Star Trek (TOS): The Ultimate Computer

[RobbyB1982]

Well, like in the episode where Data gets a girlfriend. He can feel a sense of attachment and liking, and can even have sex. But he can't be outright happy or sad, can't be comforted or enjoy a thing or get fully absorbed in a moment. He can have opinions, but not feelings about them.

He had a personality and things he was inclined towards, but that's all mental, all logic, not emotional. Basically the opposite of Spock's issue... which was of course entirely the point.

[Durandal_1707]

Well, like in the episode where Data gets a girlfriend. He can feel a sense of attachment and liking,

Which is an emotion.

and can even have sex. But he can't be outright happy or sad, can't be comforted or enjoy a thing or get fully absorbed in a moment. He can have opinions, but not feelings about them.

He can't have those emotions. Doesn't mean he doesn't have others.

He had a personality and things he was inclined towards, but that's all mental, all logic, not emotional. Basically the opposite of Spock's issue... which was of course entirely the point.

What is the logical motivation to get a girlfriend? The only one I can come up with is if you felt it was necessary for the propagation of the species, but that obviously doesn't apply in Data's case. The other reasons are all emotional: 1) the desire for attachment and affection, which is an emotion, and 2) the desire to broaden his experiences, which is also an emotion. IMO.

[Beastro]

Yes, asteroids or gamma rays bursts might, but you're scrapping the bottom of the barrel of freak occurrences.

Nothing freak about it. The Earth will be hit by large asteroids again in the future. Its not a question of if, just when.

Too fast just results in civilization as we know it collapsing quicker along with the population. I think people do not realize how few people are needed for humanity to survive. The problem is gathering them together before our ignorance of what real survival is like kills too many off for them to start reproducing.

The Great Dying was the largest mass extinction the Earth has ever seen, with over 90% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species going extinct. While the cause isn't certain (likely volcanic), the result was the planet warming very rapidly in a short amount of time. hopefully we stop before it gets anywhere near that bad in the present but if the the methane deposits go... At the end of the day people need a lot of food to live
and if climate change were to speed up that rapidly we would be hard pressed just to keep enough other things alive for us to survive.

They freak by human standards of time.

The End Permian Extinction was the result on constant, unrelenting environment pressures when they erupted and kept repeatedly erupting for thousands of years. Imagine if the last two thousand years of human history was occupied with simply surviving such events and even they they were still thousands of years away from the light at the end of the tunnel.

Other things alive for us to survive? You assume there'd be that many people around to to put that degree of pressure on the environment when the collapse of modern civilization would result in the world population collapsing back down to a few million at most.
once the other 99% died off. It would be interesting to see how such a situation would pan out with relation to the rest of the environment once those too civilized died off, not that I'd want to witness it.

[Robovski]

Am I the only person who doesn't anthropomorphize AI?
"Would you kill a child?" Is a massive begging of the question as far as "Is it alive?" and "If alive is it worth moral consideration?" or "If it is alive and worth moral consideration, can we still remove it from torpedo control until we are sure it won't lose its shit and murder a bunch of people?"

Not to mention that, unless the episode established that turning off M5 would destroy it (I haven't seen it yet so I don't know) its a flawed analogy. The question should have been "would you give a child a sedative?". The original analogy only works if he knows it sentient and with the stuff its pulled it will never be turned back on again.

Or from another angle: "Would you kill a child who is waving around a loaded gun in the middle of innocent people, already shot one person and defusing the situation by talking is not working?"

Yes. This wasn't even a hard decision; it isn't responsive to talking and it has already killed and is set to kill again. Why would I not?

[TGLS]

What is the logical motivation to get a girlfriend? The only one I can come up with is if you felt it was necessary for the propagation of the species, but that obviously doesn't apply in Data's case. The other reasons are all emotional: 1) the desire for attachment and affection, which is an emotion, and 2) the desire to broaden his experiences, which is also an emotion. IMO.

To play devil's advocate, he could be working through some Human cargo cult. Data sees and mimes out what people are doing, in order to become more human. He repeats jokes because people say they are funny. He dates and gives gifts because that is what people do when they are in love. He paints because that is what people do when they are creative. He has a cat because it is what people do. He doesn't understand the emotions behind them, he just does it because what people do.

when the collapse of modern civilization would result in the world population collapsing back down to a few million at most.

I never really understood the whole reason why the total collapse of human civilization (and the death of homo civilis) isn't good enough for some people. If civilization collapses I don't care if some homo sapiens are alive somewhere on Earth.

[Beastro]

I never really understood the whole reason why the total collapse of human civilization (and the death of homo civilis) isn't good enough for some people. If civilization collapses I don't care if some homo sapiens are alive somewhere on Earth.

Because it means we can eventually rebuild and that Mankind is a at least still around to keep perpetuating, because I'd assume that would be something I wish all poeple could agree upon is a Good Thing?

That's a sentiment I see from a lot of environmentalists that are doomcallers. They hate their comfy way of life, but they would never want to life any other way, so in their mind it's better for everything to end than for people to live in a world where conditions are not worth living.

Same could be said for someone of a religion in decline that hopes the world ends because it would be preferable to end all things than for the world to keep going without their religion in it.

It's simply the mentality of a pampered, narcissistic mind that really goes not give two fucks about the world beyond their unrealistic standards.

That is, unless the context of your post is that you're one of those twisted misanthropic that enjoys living while you blather on about how you can't wait for Mankind to die out.

If that's so then you're a step below those whom I described above.

To play devil's advocate, he could be working through some Human cargo cult. Data sees and mimes out what people are doing, in order to become more human. He repeats jokes because people say they are funny. He dates and gives gifts because that is what people do when they are in love. He paints because that is what people do when they are creative. He has a cat because it is what people do. He doesn't understand the emotions behind them, he just does it because what people do.

Exactly, the lights are on but no one is home.

[MissKittyFantastico]

To play devil's advocate, he could be working through some Human cargo cult. Data sees and mimes out what people are doing, in order to become more human. He repeats jokes because people say they are funny. He dates and gives gifts because that is what people do when they are in love. He paints because that is what people do when they are creative. He has a cat because it is what people do. He doesn't understand the emotions behind them, he just does it because what people do.

To play devil's advocate's advocate, how much of us is just doing stuff because it's what people do? I'm not saying we don't have 'natural' emotions and behaviours, but there's undoubtedly a whole heck of a lot of monkey-see monkey-do going on (I mean, hands up who hasn't felt they need to do something for Valentine's Day because that's what you do) - I forget the source, although good money's on Pratchett, but it's something along the lines of 'We learn how to be human from other humans'. If Data's observing and imitating his peers, does that really make him that different to us?

Soong complicates the question too - I feel it's pretty clear that his goal wasn't 'create artificial life' but 'create artificial human'. Even assuming the most benign possibility, Data being found on a human colony, evidently the work of a human inventor, and (barring the colours) looking human, it's not unreasonable for the possibility to occur to him that he was meant to imitate humanity, and therefore regard any human trait he lacks as desirable. I mean even if you don't know, having an inkling of what you were created for has got to be a pretty strong influence. Soong may even have hardwired into Data some 'subconscious' predisposition to that path. From his work on the emotion chip, he obviously regarded a fully human-style emotional spectrum as the goal of Data's development - he wasn't just making a life and letting it find its own path, he had a fixed end in mind.

I do feel that Data has emotions of his own, prior to the chip - 'android emotions' if you like, obviously not identical to ours, but I believe they're there. We often enough have stories about complex enough computers developing consciousness on their own - why not a conscious computer developing emergent emotion? He may not recognise them - his aspiration to human emotion and constant imitation of human behaviour may be causing him to 'subconsciously' dismiss the evidence of his own native emotions as just byproducts of his incredibly complex programming - but I feel like they sneak out when he's not paying attention. I have trouble believing 'Ode to Spot' comes from a being who genuinely has no capacity for 'friendship' as anything but a cold mimicry of other people's behaviour - I don't feel, just for the sake of composing a poem, he'd call Spot a friend if he didn't in his 'heart' believe it on some level, and that's good enough for me. Maybe he tells himself it's not inappropriate to use the word to denote a non-feeling tendency he's developed, but self-delusion is very human.

That raises the worrying prospect of whether the emotion chip truly benefits Data, or whether it's an artificial substitute that appears more 'genuine' owing to very good imitation of the psychological and physical effects we expect to see in an emotional human, and in fact relying on it is stunting the growth of whatever kind of unique being he was becoming on his own. I don't think it's impossible Soong overlooked the possibility - this is a guy who had trouble grasping that his other son was a homicidal maniac. Is Soong's work on 'perfecting' Data truly in Data's best interests, or is he just the science equivalent of a parent pushing his child to excel at whatever pastime the parent values?

Incidentally the first time Spot was introduced, I misheard the line and thought Data had named his cat Spock. I wish he had, that'd be a brilliant pet name in-universe.

[TrueMetis]

I never really understood the whole reason why the total collapse of human civilization (and the death of homo civilis) isn't good enough for some people. If civilization collapses I don't care if some homo sapiens are alive somewhere on Earth.

Because it means we can eventually rebuild and that Mankind is a at least still around to keep perpetuating, because I'd assume that would be something I wish all poeple could agree upon is a Good Thing?

Rebuild partially at least, given how much oil we've used up for example we may never be able to get back to this point.

[TGLS]

Because it means we can eventually rebuild and that Mankind is a at least still around to keep perpetuating, because I'd assume that would be something I wish all poeple could agree upon is a Good Thing?

I've always taken the opinion that what matters about humans are the ideas, knowledge and technology; the civilization. Not the biological parts. Now honestly, it would take a very bad climate catastrophe or no holds barred nuclear war to destroy civilization enough, but it doesn't leave them as the scenarios that can be ignored as out of hand, given that enough people would survive to continue the species.

[StrangeDevice]

Because it means we can eventually rebuild and that Mankind is a at least still around to keep perpetuating, because I'd assume that would be something I wish all poeple could agree upon is a Good Thing?

I've always taken the opinion that what matters about humans are the ideas, knowledge and technology; the civilization. Not the biological parts. Now honestly, it would take a very bad climate catastrophe or no holds barred nuclear war to destroy civilization enough, but it doesn't leave them as the scenarios that can be ignored as out of hand, given that enough people would survive to continue the species.

And the question there becomes -- if we survive, what do we want to be? Do we even get a choice in the matter anymore? Will we actually like what we turn into? The quality of life certainly won't increase. That much is certain.